The following summer, on the anniversary of the photograph Sabrina had tried to remove, Nathan asked me to return to Moraine Lake with him. I had not been there since Gordon and I took that picture. We drove west across the prairie and into the mountains, listening to Gordon’s old road-trip music. Before sunrise, we climbed to the lake and watched the morning light slowly turn the water that impossible turquoise I remembered.

Nathan handed his phone to a young couple and asked them to photograph us. Then he stood behind me, wrapped his arms around my waist, and rested his chin on my shoulder exactly as Gordon had done twenty-six years earlier. Just before the picture was taken, Nathan whispered one of his father’s terrible old jokes. I laughed harder than I had in years. Looking at the photograph afterward, Nathan became quiet. Then he said he could finally hear his father’s laugh again because it sounded exactly like mine. Today, that photograph sits beside the original on my upstairs shelf. I spent decades making room for everyone else, believing love meant endless compromise. It took changing the locks on my own house to understand something Gordon would have wanted me to remember: loving your family does not require disappearing for them. Sometimes closing a door is exactly what allows the right people to find their way back inside.